Compassion fatigue

I was driving home and switched over to the Wisconsin Public Radio station out of Green Bay that is all talk, all the time. A woman was delivering a news story from a foreign land, I missed the first bit so I don't know which one. She had an oddly cheerful voice for the subject matter - "...motorcycle taxis that carry passengers side-saddle to their destination, but most of the citizens travel by foot. Life is bustling, but these are all refugees in a relocation camp. A few miles away the streets are quiet. No one there but dead bodies, and the rebel soldiers who killed them..."

I turned it off. Is that wrong of me? But this was news from a country far away from here, where I don't know anyone (probably don't even know anyone who knows anyone), and the killing is not my fault, and just now, today, there's nothing I can do about it.

So, I rationalized at the time, continuing to listen would serve no purpose at all except entertainment, and it's wrong to get entertainment value out of a village full of dead bodies and the soldiers who killed them.

But then, the voice of my philosopher friends inside my head said, first of all it's important to be aware of these goings-on in the world and not turn a blind ear to them. And beyond awareness, it's your moral obligation to do what you can to stop it. You should have listened all the way to the end of the story and if they didn't say again what country it was in you should have called the station to find out, and then, right then, you should have done whatever you could to stop the killing, including running off and joining the Peace Corps, alerting the media and insisting that they make a big deal about it, forming a non-profit fund-raising group, organizing people, creating urgency in your community, working hard. As a human being, you have a serious and incontrovertible moral obligation to do whatever you can to stop this kind of thing happening, even if, no, especially if, you don't know the people and don't know anyone who knows them.

Piss off, I said to my inner philosopher. And drove off listening to something else.